March Demo Day Recap

Our March Demo Day was an awesome battle between our amazing tech sales recruits!

After 12 weeks of training at Uvaro, our recruits often become some of the best tech salespeople within Silicon Valley. Everyday, these talented individuals work towards polishing their skills in tactical prospecting, discovery, objection handling, and weaving in personalised stories to become a better tech salesperson.

In 15 uninterrupted minutes, the top candidates get the chance to showcase their abilities to deliver a specific type of software demo.

Event Recap: March Demo Day

Event Transcript:

Joseph Fung: Hi everyone! Welcome to the Uvaro Demo Day this is going to be a lot of fun we have a wicked slate of judges, competitors some fun apps being shared with us today. Again as usual going to give you a quick intro to who you'll be seeing today then we're going to invite you right into the Zoom room so you can see the action as its happening. So, let's get things kicked off as always we can't do this without some incredible judges who are generous and sharing their time. And here's who you're going to be hearing from today.

I won't be labored at the moment because we will be inviting them to introduce themselves shortly. But yes we have some incredible judges who will be evaluating all of the pitches watching how they cover all the basis of a great discovery, a great sales process and then providing some really great feedback. So if you want to see how all these pitches are evaluated, stay until the end and you get to hear that feedback. We also have four incredibly talented recruits that are going to be showcasing their sales skills today.

Now to set the stage, this is not the order they're presenting they don't know who's up first, which is super exciting and super tough. So I'm sure they're sitting itching waiting to hear who's first you're going to be hearing about four different applications being pitched to four different buyers and so our VP of customer excellence Greg Boyd will be playing the buyer in each of these role plays.

And this is going to be really fun. But, before we dig in before we invite you into the Zoom room want to cover some house rules for those of you joining us already in the Zoom room, this is for you as well.

Number one, for the house, if you're in the Zoom area please keep your cameras on that makes it a lot easier for the competitors but keep your microphones on mute so they can focus and get their pitches out. We do encourage you to keep the chat going and you can see it hammering along there.

It's a good opportunity to offer questions comments opinions on how you think a pitch is going or to feed back channel questions to our buyer Greg who can use that to make the sales pitch tougher, easier and throw some curveballs and then towards our competitors. Quick reminder, this is an opportunity to build up so critical feedback is great.

But always make sure if you're highlighting a challenge give some suggestions on how to improve and number one always is like and subscribe on YouTube because that's how you can get notified of new Demo Days coming up and a great way to launch the sales careers of all of our competitors.

For our competitors, I know you've heard this a million times already but here’s the rule of the competition again. Number one, when you start off be sure to highlight what you're selling and who you're selling it to, remind our audience, remind our judges who that persona is so they know exactly how they're evaluating your pitch. You have exactly 15 minutes. I have a timer here, I will interrupt you.

So keep a close watch of the time you have available because that includes the start of your pitch all the way through to the close and getting your next steps booked. After each presentation we'll let you know who the next competitor is we'll give the judges a couple of minutes to finish up their scores and then we'll move on to the next one. After the first two presenters, we'll have a quick five-minute break; people can top up their coffee, their drinks, take a quick walk and then come back in and then again.

At the tail end, we will announce the results, we'll share who our demo champion is and we'll get some feedback from the judges. those are the house rules, let's actually get some introductions so what I'm going to do now is I'm going to stop sharing my screen for those who are in Zoom and for those of you who are on YouTube we're actually going to invite you right into the Zoom room so we can do some introductions.

So let's actually do that. Welcome into the Zoom session. I'd like to start off with asking each of our judges to introduce themselves and we're going to go around and do the same order as on the slide so James then Shane, Maddi and Cedric, could you help tell our competitors and our audience your role, what you do and what brought you to today's session. James, can you kick us off?

James Howell: He's done mute! Yeah, absolutely my name is James Howell and I founded a company named MindFloss. We believe that sales people deserve to be fulfilled in what they do every day and really believe in bridging the gap between success at work and success in your personal life and we think that that's born out of radical personal development.

What brought me here today, I just think that Uvaro from the moment I heard about it, which was only a few months ago is just such an interesting and positive thing to have in the sales community. I was so intrigued when I first found out about it and that’s what's led me here today after getting to know the Uvaro crew.

Joseph Fung: That's so great! Thank you so much James. Shane, can you introduce yourself for the audience?

Shane Gamble: Absolutely! Thank you Joseph. Nice to meet you everyone. And I'm glad to be here my name is Shane Gamble and I'm the Director of Sales at a company named Daasity. At Daasity, we help direct to consumer e-commerce brands, make better data-driven decisions so they can grow faster and more profitably. So ultimately what we do is we centralize their data from all the different tools that they're using to make it really easy for them to find insights which they can use to grow faster.

And we work with some of the brands that you folks would know and love you know from Rothys Kapari beauty to the skin care and a whole bunch more. The reason that I'm here today though is because I love new sales talent and I feel like there is a gap in our industry. A lot of post-secondary institutions do not train people to start careers in sales and they're left to figure it out on their own.

So I am a huge fan of companies like Uvaro and what Uvaro was doing and I was actually introduced by a former judge named Mercedes Geimer and I'm so excited to be here, I'm so excited to help us here, this new wave of sales talent into the industry. Good Luck everyone! Could not be more stoked to watch and also to learn from you.

Joseph Fung: Shane, that's so awesome! Maddi, you're going to be up next but before you do I've got that two-minute timer. So, I want to give our first competitor a heads up. So, our first competitor who will be presenting their pitch will be Eli. Eli Zeldin, so you've got a couple of minutes to get yourself ready. Maddi, can you introduce yourself?

Maddison Fairbairn: Yeah, absolutely! So, my name's Maddi Fairbairn or Maddison whatever you want to call me and I actually founded a group called Young Sales Professional KW, introduced to Uvaro through Mercedes Geimer as well and my full-time job not that I don't love young sales professionals but it's more of my passion as an Account Executive at Auvik Networks where I worked with Mercedes. So I love this idea in general Demo Day is awesome.

I wish I had something like this when I was coming into sales and I just love that you guys have a platform to showcase your talent and what you've learned and really excited to see what you do today.

Joseph Fung: Thank you so much. And Cedric, can you round out the introductions and help everybody know where you're coming from today?

Cedric D'Souza: Hi, my name is Cedric. I'm actually at SurveyMonkey and Christina actually reached out. I used to work with Christina and she mentioned Uvaro and I've actually heard of Uvaro. And it really drew me to what you do because most salespeople that I talk to actually stumble into sales versus you know finding that passion so it's good that you have that prep before going into a field that is very unexpected. So I'm excited, pumped to hear all these demos today.

Joseph Fung: Awesome! That's fantastic! We are ready to dig in quick before we check housekeeping first for our judges. Do you have access to your scorecards? You’re all set. Can I get thumbs up? Great! And for our competitors, you're all set, you're ready to go.

Can I get thumbs up? Nice, Eli you're first again a quick reminder, watch the timer because I'll have one running. Be sure to introduce again the product you're pitching and who you're selling it to and I'll start those 15 minutes when your pitch actually begins. So, I'll mute myself but please the floor is yours. Please introduce your product and yourself.

Eli Zeldin: Hi everybody my name is Eli Zeldin and I'm gonna be pitching the service that the company that I work for actually offers which is Castle HR, modern HR strategies and processes. And I will be pitching it to the CEO of Uvaro will be played by Greg today.

And before I get into this I just want to thank everybody for being here it really means a lot to myself and the rest of the competitors and we thank you for your support both in the past and ongoing. So I'm going to start my screen share. Give you guys a little bit of a razzle dazzle. And I just want to find Greg there.

Greg Boyd: I can see you Eli.

Eli Zeldin: I can see you! Fantastic! And let me get that up! And we're good to go! Hi Greg, how have you been?

Greg Boyd: It's good! It’s good to be speaking to you again Eli. Thanks for setting up some time.

Eli Zeldin: Oh thank you so much for making the time for me. I saw on LinkedIn that you live in Kitchener. Is that correct?

Greg Boyd: I do! This is an important distinction. I actually live in Waterloo. Nothing against Kitchener specifically, but I do like to clarify that when whenever I am asked.

Eli Zeldin: Excellent! Well I appreciate the accuracy. Did you also get bamboozled by the warm spell we had yesterday up here in Toronto?

Greg Boyd: Warm spell! Yeah, my son decided to roll around in some mud on the pickup from school and so that I guess bamboozled by the weather, so I was enchanted by the weather bamboozled by my five almost six-year-old. I'll put it that way.

Eli Zeldin: You know what the same thing happened to me but instead of an actual child it was just my dog. So, at least at least somebody's enjoying it. Even if you and I maybe not be.

Greg Boyd: The benefit the benefit there is that at least my children can bathe themselves. I don't know about your dog.

Eli Zeldin: I spent a little bit of time with my dog in the bathtub, bathing her down.

Greg Boyd: You quit the visual Eli. You really got me here!

Eli Zeldin: Well that's what are we if not visual sellers as well. And that's why I've got the screen share up with you and I'll get to that a little bit later. But, I'm gonna get straight to the point because I know your time is valuable. So, today we're gonna talk, spend most of the time talking about you and Uvaro.

A little bit about Castle HR's, Modern Hr strategies. And we'll wrap up with a short discussion about the next steps if we both feel this is a good fit. And I'll leave some time in the end for you to ask me any outstanding questions you may have. Is there anything that I've left off the agenda that you want me to touch on?

Greg Boyd: No I think like you said a little short on time so whatever we can cover off would be helpful Eli.

Eli Zeldin: And just to clarify this is a hard stop at 15 minutes correct?

Greg Boyd: Yeah, you got I got to step into something right at the bottom of the hour.

Eli Zeldin: No problem! So now to see if we can help you I need to learn a little bit more about your current situation. You likely face growing pains that are pretty common in scaling companies and my goal is to figure out which ones are causing you the most problems and that way I can sort of match the right solution to your pain. Does that sound good to you?

Greg Boyd: Sure let's give it a shot if you if you can dial in on my biggest pains in the next three to four minutes, I think that'd be helpful.

Eli Zeldin: Absolutely! So, with that in mind I wanted to know, what motivated you to join me here today? What peeked your interest?

Greg Boyd: So, I think I'd say that we're I mean we're growing and in order to support the community that we have I mean we need top talent. Frankly! I mean my I'd say that my biggest challenge in that is we have a high performing team, but everyone's working at 50% and adding new people to the mix is compelling but it's gonna take time and effort and energy to get them ramped.

So, it's one of those situations where we have people who are a players working too hard so how do we support and keep them engaged and equally at the same time we've got the challenge of well we got to bring on new people which introduces a whole bunch of new work. so I'd say I've kind of got this dual challenge that I'm trying to work through.

Eli Zeldin: Absolutely! Sounds to me like the real question, is how do you attract these A players? But still really sort of keep the company's values and feelings while you scale up. And am I off base on that?

Greg Boyd: I'd say it's attracting is a piece of it. I think getting them equipped to be successful when they're when they're here is another piece of the puzzle for sure.

Eli Zeldin: Absolutely! That’s great to know. So, that'll really inform the direction that our conversation goes today! And now before I can sort of like dial in on your other pains. I want to know a couple things about Uvaro and the company's vision and values. So, my question is, does Uvaro have a clearly defined company value or set of values?

Greg Boyd: I'd say it's reasonably well defined. I'd say that it's the type of thing that for us and for our business, it's we're growing so quickly that I think keeping those top of mind for the organisations is something we perhaps struggle to do. But we do have a I mean we do have them framed up for as a foundation for sure.

Eli Zeldin: And of those values that you have framed up which value do you reference the most?

Greg Boyd: I mean I think you're really putting me to the test here. I think I would have to say honesty and empathy is one of our core values for us to be able to continue to operate that's internally we've got to equip our team with the tools to be honest with each other we need to attract the type of talent that's comfortable with that and then can also be empathetic to others and that's both colleagues and internally but it's a core value because we need to reflect that with the customers we serve as well.

Eli Zeldin: Absolutely! I mean that's the key to sales is honesty and empathy. So I'm glad to hear that those are sort of your guiding your north star your guiding principles. I am going to shift gears a little bit and talk about onboarding and ramping and new hires a little bit. And what I really want to know is, when new hires join Uvaro, are they presented with an employee handbook?

Greg Boyd: Somewhat I'd say somewhat we have I mean we use some of our own tools and technology to get people up to speed. But I wouldn't say it's a formal handbook. But we've got some digital resources that we provide.

Eli Zeldin: For sure and when was the last time that these resources were reviewed or updated by an expert?

Greg Boyd: Well we're all experts around here Eli. I'd say I'd say maybe that's a bit of a challenge, there's lots of lots of different people contributing to these playbooks lots of hands involved. so having expert input I'd say it's been perhaps a long time something I've been meaning to do myself for a long time but I haven't had a chance to get to.

Eli Zeldin: Yeah, that's something that we typically hear from a lot of sort of startup companies that are that are looking to scale and grow now. So, as a follow-up question, do you feel that your employee handbook is fully protecting your team and company?

Greg Boyd: Protecting?

Eli Zeldin: Yeah!

Greg Boyd: So, I think going back to that value honesty and empathy we've got a high performing team. I mean the idea that we are getting the right people and aligning people to those values I'd say that that's a gap for us right now!

I'm honest that getting people aligned to the values we I think we do exhibit those as part of the core team but as new people come in I'm concerned about how we formally demonstrate those values and codify that into how we work that that's really important to us to be able to scale the way we need to.

Eli Zeldin: Yeah absolutely! I totally understand that. I'm going to skip over a couple of the other questions I had because it seems like talent acquisition is going to be sort of our and onboarding process is going to be really where we're going to find the most pain. So moving on to your talent acquisition process, just also to be mindful of our time, do you have a structured interview process for finding and identifying eight players?

Greg Boyd: I think that each of our hiring leaders inside the organization has a good read on has a good read on what they're looking for roles. We standardize on some key values that are pervasive so things that each hiring leader would be looking for there would be one or two of those core thing core elements. So, we'd call that fit perhaps, I would say that there's some gaps in terms of how everyone defines fit. So, while that value is standardized I don't know if we've again codified in a formal way, how we're how we're doing that by each function.

Eli Zeldin: Interesting! Very interesting! And again that's something that's very common with a lot of the companies that we work with. just because there's so much on your plate when you're trying to scale a company up that that it's hard to really sort of sit down with everybody together and standardize those and get everybody on the same page.

Do you feel that you're doing interview and security meaning do you say they're a good fit there but let's interview a few more candidates or are you confident pulling the trigger using your scorecard using your process, your interview process?

Greg Boyd: I think I think the way I'd answer that is what I feel while I might feel comfortable with that within my own team my own part of the organization, I think we're always looking at how do we how do we scale how do we operate consistently as we scale and I would have concerns about taking what we have now and passing that to others in the organization being hands off and just letting them run with it because I don't think we've put enough, I don't think we put enough checks and balances in place to equip leaders other leaders in our organization to be successful.

Eli Zeldin: Sounds good! So I'm gonna do a quick recap here just to make sure that we're on the same page. So honesty and empathy are your core values. I love that. You feel that there's a bit of a gap getting people aligned and it's going to be a concern for you as you scale up. And the big question for you is how do you scale and operate consistently and you're concerned that you're currently working with a system that isn't going to make that possible or it's going to create a little bit of friction and as you scale them am I off base on that?

Greg Boyd: I think we're I think we're pretty aligned early I think it's it comes back to those core things of we're looking to scale A players in the organization how do you get more in but then consistently higher in that way and then support them once they're here. So I think we're speaking the same language.

Eli Zeldin: So, would it be fair to say that Uvaro has a good hr base but you're looking to upgrade in some areas?

Greg Boyd: Yes!

Eli Zeldin: Excellent I love to hear that. So, I'm going to direct your attention now to our shared screen and just really quickly these are some customers that we work with clients that we work with and we consider them to be in the top five percent of companies because they're following our modern hr strategies. And they're really they're really finding some joy with it. So based off what you told me what we do at castle seems like a great fit for you as well. So would it be okay if I give you a really quick rundown of our process?

Greg Boyd: I'd love I'd love to in 30 seconds or less which of those customers on that chart would you say from what I've said aligned to what we're doing here some of the challenges we have here at Uvaro.

Eli Zeldin: So, that would probably we think on and what we've really you know had the most success with them on is on right here identifying and hiring and onboarding their A players.

You know in addition to the documentation that will help you build out that that aligns with your values and your culture and the expert HR advice that you're going to have on-call with a professional HR, an Hr professional with 10 plus years of experience. what I think we're going to find the most joy in when we're if we work together is that we're going to help you identify hire and onboard your true A players and these are people that align with your culture we're going to help you clearly define your talent acquisition strategy which could produce you know up to 70 higher-quality hires for you.

To use, think on as an example we started working with them in 2020 at a time when you know a lot of companies were either in a hiring freeze or laying off and furloughing employees, when we started working with ThinkCon, they had a team of about 38 people and over the course of the last year they've scaled to 75 people that's some explosive growth right there. So I think that that sort of this is going to be a big part of our process if we do work together.

As well as all the other parts of our modern hr roadmap that we would work with you on. We’re also going to help you implement a modern HR tech stack so that you can you can you know efficiently do your hr activities and make data driven data-driven decisions. So I'd like to at this point I'd like to open the floor up to you to see if you have any questions for me. If we do move on to another conversation with our CEO Tom Nickel, we'll get more into the weeds with on the other elements of our hr process.

Greg Boyd: Okay! So, I mean this sounds compelling a question that I've got and I'm mindful of our time here. so I guess I'll give you the two questions, the first is, I mean we're an organization that's scaling and that's unique, sounds like you have other companies that you've worked with that are doing that I'd have some concerns about how would it work for us. so that's something for you to take away and think about but just before we wrap.

I mean I've got a new group of people that we are looking to onboard in the next few weeks, so coming in April. So what do we just need to do to get started so that we can keep things moving forward?

Eli Zeldin: I'm so glad you asked that question because that was literally what I was gonna to bring up next, and so what we would need to do to get this process very quickly is to schedule you a call with our CEO Tom Nichols where he'll get more into the weeds and your pains and issues and walk you through our modern HR processes. So with that in mind I wanted to know if it made sense to you to move on to that conversation with Tom next week. I've got some time available on Monday afternoon or Wednesday at 2.

Greg Boyd: Okay! I should probably just take a look at my calendar. I mean do you mind shooting me over those times, shoot me a note with sometimes and then I can I mean I just am mindful that we've only got a few minutes left here.

Eli Zeldin: Absolutely! Is it gonna be the same email that I shot the invite to you for this meeting?

Greg Boyd: Yeah! It is it just fired over there and then I I'd love to look to get some time on other books. I think a conversation would be a good next step to dig in a little bit deeper Eli.

Eli Zeldin: Excellent! And feel free to forward that to anybody else on your team who you think would benefit from being in that conversation!

Greg Boyd: Cool! Well! I appreciate the time also would be interested to hear more about some of these other customers here!

Joseph Fung: I'm sorry to jump in gentlemen. Oh! We’re right there!

Eli Zeldin: Right on it! Well I just want to say thank you thank you Greg and thank you everybody for watching this and I really appreciate all the time that you've taken with us!

Greg Boyd: That’s perfect good job Eli thank you.

Eli Zeldin: Thank You.

Joseph Fung: Eli, it was great you can wrap up the screen share! That was awesome take a deep breath. Great job! Just to give a heads up our second competitor will be Abhi. So Abhi, you have a couple of minutes to get ready, our judges can finish their comments, their scores. Eli, take a breath, you got it off. How are you feeling?

Eli Zeldin: I was feeling more nervous before this than I did for the three TFC MLS cup finals that I've been to. So, so I was feeling pretty nervous. I'm feeling pretty good about it especially since I just started my new role with the company this week and I'm just operating as an SDR. So, I think that that it went well, but I'm already mulling in my mind all the places where I could have improved. So I would say I'm happy but I see a lot of room for improvement that I'm looking forward to working with.

Joseph Fung: See I'd ask you where you should improve but we don't want to give away all the secrets to the next competitors. Let’s sit tight on that one. I candidly love how you handle the questions no hesitation to dig in even when Greg throws out those tough ones. Man logo wall which one do we match with Greg, that's a brutal question, I love that I'm keeping that in my back pocket. Thank you! I see I see our judges looking up. Can I get thumbs up? How are you doing on scores? Are you good? Do you need more time? Do you have thumbs up there?

Shane Gamble: Would you like me to have my comments in now?

Joseph Fung: Comments in afterwards are fine! Just want to make sure that you're good to move forward. Okay! Folks we're looking good. Abhi, how about you? You all set up, any burning questions you're good to go?

Abhi Lenka: Yeah!

Joseph Fung: Awesome! Then again quick reminder, be sure to introduce yourself the product that you're selling and who you're selling it to, so that we all know what Greg has to pretend to be. So, that'll be a lot of fun. I'm gonna mute myself and after you do the intro when you kick off the pitch that's when I'll put 15 minutes on the timer. Floor is yours!

Abhi Lenka: Thanks Joseph! The product I'd be doing is Vidyard and it’s an asynchronous video service and what I'm, who I'm going to be pitching it to is the VP of Sales at Ducebo which is a learning management system and fortunately the person also deals with the customer service side of it and so they have quite a good control over the whole sales domain out there in Ducebo. All right! All right! We can begin. Hi Greg! How are you doing today?

Greg Boyd: I'm great Abhi! Thanks for setting up some time it's good to be speaking with you again.

Abhi Lenka: No problem! No problem! I just reached out to you last week. I knew that I could really help you and I thought I'd reach out I'm glad that we are here talking today. Before I begin, I must say cheers on getting accepted for their any collective I think I think that's a great feat, excited for you.

Greg Boyd: Thank you thanks very much Abhi. I appreciate that.

Abhi Lenka: No problem! No problem! Like, I'm actually very excited because I've been following Ducebo very closely. personally love the product and when I heard about this I knew that okay fine you're gonna take the shiver to new heights especially after that stellar year that you did last year like 50% annual growth on income. Wow! What was that?

Greg Boyd: Yeah it's they're we're fortunate to be in an industry that's benefited from the chaos of the past year. But we've got a great product to back it up so, that's an exciting time for everybody here to Ducebo.

Abhi Lenka: Yeah! I mean, it did work out but I'm pretty sure you had some challenges last year as well, right?

Greg Boyd: Of course well I mean there is success is not the best teacher and now we have a whole host of great new customers and a lot of excitement but that yeah of course creates some new challenges and the bar is now higher for 2021.

Abhi Lenka: I couldn't agree with you more out there. Alright, so what I what I want to do right now is maybe talk to you about how you've been dealing with these challenges that you mentioned. Maybe see if Vidyard is a great fit for you. And if it's so I will briefly demo you about how Vidyard would be healthy and we'll be able to help you and then if that once that's done I'd let you ask me any questions that you may have and finally I'll let you know about the next steps if it seems like a good thing at that point. How does that sound?

Greg Boyd: Sounds good to me Abhi. As you mentioned we've only got a bit of time today so let's see let's see where we can go with us.

Abhi Lenka: So that 15 minutes right?

Greg Boyd: Yeah about that.

Abhi Lenka: I'll try to keep it at that. Alright! Before I dig deeper can I understand a few things about your business how you've been doing over the last year? I mean and if I'm looking here or noting down something I'm not looking into oblivion just taking down some notes so that I can serve you better.

Can I understand how you know your goals have definitely evolved from last year? Right? It’s a time when you want to aggressively grow that's shown in the annual reports. So, your mode being face to face primarily for booming meetings and you know doing business. How’s that changed now? I mean how are you dealing with that?

Greg Boyd: So our I mean our customer base and the people who buy technologies like Docebo I mean they're I mean they're comfortable with and familiar with and used to meeting big conference rooms, white boards and presentations. So all of that had to adapt last year. But I think the world is just now used to that approach. But we sell in a cluttered environment.

I mean the learning technology space is just full of a lot of noise and we've been able to capitalize on that. But I think we're in a spot now where we have a dual challenge of keeping our new customers engaged. so making sure that we're developing and maintaining meaningful relationships and having meaningful touchpoints with them, but we have to be able to do that at scale, and then as far as getting out into the market.

I think we've any low hanging fruit that there may have been we've got that so now it's how do we move upmarket and get the attention of larger organizations who may want to use our product. We had great success in the mid-market but now I mean the enterprise is a spot where we want to want to grow into. So it's important to us.

Abhi Lenka: Yeah, I mean especially if you're going to move up that's going to be a big challenge, right. So I’m assuming last year you were all doing like you know out the cold outreach we have phone and stuff like that. Has that changed at all this year?

Greg Boyd: I mean it's a lot of emails. Our I mean to appeal to our buyers who are used to the whiteboards and the big conference rooms and presentations I mean we have a lot of people selling products that are used to that approach. they play well in that space and so I think we've been traditional in our approach.

I'm looking for I mean would like to have better data on what's working, again the phone rings we're in that fortunate position the phone's ringing but I don't think we can count on that forever so it's a combination of getting more meaningful leads and then equipping our teams to be successful in their outreach.

Abhi Lenka: Right I think that makes sense a lot of our clients and prospects have moved that way. So how are your clients doing the meetings right now since your customers are very traditional and they want that face-to-face interaction? How are you doing your meetings right now?

Greg Boyd: I think it'd be it'd be like it'd be like most environments I suppose I mean we're when we get the meeting or it's a lot of this, a lot of Zoom and so you know thanks for calling me after hours I booked all day but it's getting dark outside so we just keep the Zoom going all night as I'm sure you do too. So I mean this is what it is. it's a lot of Zoom calls a lot of PowerPoint is this is what the team's grown used to I wouldn't say we're the best at it but it's certainly what we're what we're used to and what we're what we're operating.

Abhi Lenka: Right and Zoom's a great tool you know once you have the meeting it really helps you build that rapport but that's really great. I'm afraid, like how is that helping you to deal with without Zoom you know for your BDRs when you don't have an appointment how do your BDRs deal with it?

Greg Boyd: Well I think that to tie into our traditional approach I'm trying to emphasize personalization wherever we can. I mean we've gotta we do have a strong marketing organization that that helps us to fill the funnel but converting to converting when it turns to in terms of meaningful outreach from our SDR team.

I mean that's not high I mean we're looking to improve in that area so. we have email we have some people who have started to use some basic video which is why I thought it'd be interesting to talk to you, but we're certainly not fully equipped as an organization to operate in that way.

Abhi Lenka: May I ask what do you use for video communication for your cool down features?

Greg Boyd: It's informal right now we just had a few people who are familiar with I mean they're using quick tools on their other desktops to record video. I think a few members of our team are using some of the basic go video features, I believe that's what the products called.

And so they're just using that video some people have talked about it as being helpful for them but again it's just something I've heard about but I haven't seen much more than just people anecdotally talking about this new tool so it's a combination of things.

Abhi Lenka: And maybe one of my last questions have you been able to see a drop in your cold outreach conversions compared to pre-Covid times maybe, right now?

Greg Boyd: A drop in our pre-covid reach conversion, I suppose so it's something that we're watching. I just think it's we had a lot of inbound and so we benefited from that, so, we're now pivoting back to tail reach and so I mean our conversion has been reasonable, but I think we are looking for a way to differentiate and get better quality leads into our rep's hands for sure.

Abhi Lenka: Wow! I think I have what I need here and from what I'm hearing I see a great fit with Vidyard and maybe I can just show you why I think so would it be fine if I start sharing my screen and quickly take you through what I'm talking about here?

Greg Boyd: Sure yeah again I've heard of the free tool. I'm just keen to learn a little bit more about what else you have to offer.

Abhi Lenka: Well nice! What do you know about the free tool of Vidyard?

Greg Boyd: It's just the, I've heard a couple people on the team talking about how they use it that they're you asked what tools we're using a couple members of the team are just are tossing some video into or testing some video into their messages and some people are comfortable with it, some people aren't comfortable with it those who are using it say that it's helped them but nobody has any meaningful data for me on how it's helping them. But some people are excited about it and again that's why I was interested to talk.

Abhi Lenka: I think I know exactly what to tell you about now. This is your client's mailbox right? you see how cluttered it is and that's every morning you come in and that's the kind of junk mails that you see and you know your mails are one of these and a lot of our clients are seeing something similar.

So probably that's the reason why you know you don't get as much conversion as you did pre-co with times especially now that you're going outbound, it's gonna be tough because you will you cannot depend on inbound leads for the enterprise clients you need to probably focus on that outbound outreach. And then your emails are going to look like this just imagine this kind of email sitting full of text, sitting in their bulky cluttered mailbox it's just gonna go over their heads right?

Greg Boyd: I've got about 200 of these.

Abhi Lenka: Pardon me.

Greg Boyd: I've got about 200 of these in red in my inbox.

Abhi Lenka: Exactly! Exactly what I'm talking about. So, what I see is where Vidyard can help you is your employees, SDRs, BDRs even AEs or even customer success, people can simply go to the top of their page, start recording, either through a camera and screen version or just the screen version, alright, and have the same level of personalization that I'm having with you right now.

They don't need to book an appointment; they don't need to worry to give out the important details till they have an appointment right. Once you're done recording, it doesn't end there you just put that video link there and this is how your email turns around.

Now this is a great premise for your SDR's to have some in, because when you say that there's a personalized video, they have more incentive to open it, when they open it they see this they have a reason to see it, and that's just not it like as you mentioned you have no data to track it.

I think you're going to be psyched about what I'm going to share with you right now. When you share this it Vidyard is going to give you a dashboard that is going to track each and every detail of how that video has been received.

I know your team is super agile, you have been changing and this is something that could totally help your team quantify that which communication is working, which one is not, which one is getting unique views, all right, you would be able to identify viewers and see how many different people were able to, you know, get advantage out of it so, so far does it sound like something that could help your platform?

Greg Boyd: So I mean this getting all this sort of data and this feels like this would be the type of thing that would take some time to implement, I mean and we've got data from all sorts of different tools that we look at. I mean this just tell me about this like how do I get this implemented because I mean I can't take people away from selling we've got to we've got to go and execute.

Abhi Lenka: Oh yeah! Absolutely! The usage is very simple and this data is very easily integratable with most platforms out there. I'm assuming you'd be using either Salesforce or HubSpot video integrates perfectly with both of those.

Greg Boyd: Okay.

Abhi Lenka: So irrespective of what your CRM is you don't have to leave that at all you just track it better now.

Greg Boyd: And I mean for our customers I talked about them being traditional. I mean do you have customers who are using this in those non-traditional environments where I mean do people open video and for the type of customer base that we have?

Abhi Lenka: Yeah! I mean we have a customer called MyoVision and MyoVision generally deals with municipalities and I hope you understand how traditional they are right. So with that kind of a base they were able to attract and get better traction with them. You know if government officers can use this, I'm pretty sure your customers who are primarily tech enterprises that they're gonna just eat this up they would love it trust me.

Greg Boyd: Okay well I'm interested! Ultimately, who do you need to speak to inside my organization because this is interesting, but I'd love to maybe dig in a little bit more?

Abhi Lenka: Perfect question! I think what I could do is I could set up a full demo all right so that whoever in your organization, if they want to have any questions or something I could address that maybe sales people, customer success and primarily your team and eventually maybe if it's a success in your own your silo, you can take it to other teams as well does that sound good?

Greg Boyd: Okay! I'm interested! And for sure I think that having a broader look would be helpful.

Abhi Lenka: Yeah absolutely! So, let me do one thing, I will set up a meeting for early next week. Does Monday or Tuesday work for you?

Greg Boyd: Yeah do you mind sending over sometimes actually for me Abhi. I mean just can work with that and see what make happen?

Abhi Lenka: Would you have your calendar rule accessible right now?

Greg Boyd: Let me see if I can open it up. Yeah, it looks like I suppose it looks like I could make Monday work. I'll check with the other members of the team, but, I think let's pencil in something for Monday.

Abhi Lenka: Alright! So, Monday, before lunch, after lunch.

Greg Boyd: Yeah sure sounds perfect, after lunch should be perfect.

Abhi Lenka: Okay! So, I'll send you an invite for three o'clock please feel free to tell me changes if you have any. I'll send you an invite and I'll also send you a link with all the customers that you have so that we have who have been using it so that you have got an idea of how I can help you.

Alright, now, thank you so much for your time. I'm so glad that we talked today. I'm very looking forward to Monday’s discussion and I hope I'll be able to help you more.

Greg Boyd: Awesome! Abhi, I'll look forward to hearing from you I'd love more of those stories for customers like ours just to better understand how they're using it.

Abhi Lenka: I am sure to be right away! Okay! Alright! Please feel free to share these links with anyone. I have greg@ducebo.com. Is that right?

Greg Boyd: That’s right! Yeah, that's my address.

Abhi Lenka: If you want me to add someone else please share their email id’s with me just forward the…

Joseph Fung: Abhi, Greg you're out of time!

Greg Boyd: Goodbye!

Abhi Lenka: Goodbye Greg!

Joseph Fung: Great job! Snuck in the scheduling of timing, right at the wire, that gong went off just as you were wrapping up! So, job well done! We would give our judges a couple of minutes. Abhi, take a breath! How are you feeling?

Abhi Lenka: Oh my god! I think I blanked out for the last five minutes!

Joseph Fung: I can see you know the audience, the judges, and competitors cheering for you. I confess I was watching that time go down and I was watching Greg's trying to get off the line and you're trying to pin it on the time, trying to validate the email, get it all in. That's good! Good effort! While our judges are taking notes and items we're going to take a brief five minute break for those on YouTube! We’ll bring you back in just a moment. But go ahead top up your coffee, your waters and we'll see you in a moment.

Joseph Fung: Hey everyone! Welcome back, this is gonna be a blast we've got two more competitors then we get to hear the feedback, the scores, crown a champion. Next up we have Siewyee, the big reminder again please introduce yourself, the product you're selling and who you're selling to.

Again, so we all know what hat Greg is wearing during the pitch. And then once you get started and actually dig into the material, I'll get that 15-minute timer going. So that you're off to go. So we've got all of our judges back in, so we're set there, I'm gonna mute myself, Siewyee, the floor is yours, the mic is yours. Good luck!

Siewyee Sai: Hi! Good evening everyone, my name is Siewyee, I will be demoing Mappedin, an indoor way-finding digital mapping solution. The prospect is digital marketing managers at premium outlet malls in Japan. I am focusing on malls owned by Mitsubishi Estate Simon Company Ltd.

And this is a joint venture between Mitsubishi Estate and Simon properties. Additional marketing managers are responsible for managing all digital assets which include the digital mapping system. So, we had, Greg and I had one conversation last week, which led to this demo meeting. Hi Greg! How are you doing today?

Greg Boyd: Good Siewyee! Good to be speaking to you again! Thanks for your time!

Siewyee Sai: No problem! Thank you for the opportunity to speak. I just read the Japanese PR times today and learned that you launched the premium outlet day, a few months ago to commemorate your 20th anniversary. How did that go?

Greg Boyd: There’s a lot of excitement about that! I mean retail has had a challenging past 12 months to say the least, so having some good news to celebrate I think is everybody feeling energized. Put it that way. So, it was a good win it was a good win for the whole team.

Siewyee Sai: Oh! I love that! A good win! That is so amazing! Congratulations! That's a big achievement, Greg, I also heard that you love to cook. I love to cook too!

Greg Boyd: Oh good!

Siewyee Sai: Yeah!

Greg Boyd: What's your favorite?

Siewyee Sai: Yeah, I was going to ask you, I was going to ask you, but you got me there first. My favorite go-to dinner recipe is Japanese curry. What about you?

Greg Boyd: Japanese curry! So I don't know I think I actually would have to say I was I don't know why I was jumping all over because it's definitely pizza but not just pep and cheese. I mean, the dough, the sauce the whole thing, so, when I can make the time for that's a good treat. I love. That puts me in a good space!

Siewyee Sai: Yeah, that sounds so amazing! And so good, you know what Greg, we need to chat after this demo over coffee and we definitely need to swap dinner recipes.

Greg Boyd: Yes!

Siewyee Sai: Okay!

Greg Boyd: Yeah, I would say that sounds like a fair next step. Yeah that Japanese curry sounds pretty good. Yeah!

Siewyee Sai: Yeah! Let’s just guess here! I appreciate you taking time to chat with me today! We have 15 minutes scheduled disaster work for you.

Greg Boyd: It does yeah so hard to stop at the 15, so let’s just do what we can do here!

Siewyee Sai: Got you! And it's just the two of us on this demo?

Greg Boyd: Yeah just you and I.

Siewyee Sai: Great! There are no big decisions to be made today, Greg, typically in a meeting like this. I will be focusing on gaining an understanding of your needs and requirements and for us to determine together if Mappedin solutions would be a good fit, if we determine together that we are a good fit, the next step would be to book a full demo.

If we decide that there is no good fit, then we will part as friends. So, let's take, let's stop a few minutes before the end of this meeting to decide our next steps together. Does that sound like a fair deal to you?

Greg Boyd: This sounds great! It's yeah! Let’s do it!

Siewyee Sai: Okay great! now you mentioned last week when we chatted that you wanted to talk about how to use, how you, how to update your pdf mall maps, easily and quickly and also to publish your updates in real time on your website. Is this something you want to focus on today?

Greg Boyd: Yeah! That sounds I mean that's what I was talking about I mean that would be perfect!

Siewyee Sai: Okay!

Greg Boyd: We run a lean team! And it feels like there's a big hill to climb to make this attractive. And so yeah I would like to dig into this topic, for sure.

Siewyee Sai: Okay is there anything else you were hoping to cover today?

Greg Boyd: I think I'm just keen on understanding how given our environment I mean having digital mapping. I mean this is just it's what customers it feels like they expect so I am keen and I'm doing some shopping. So, I'd like to understand, how can we get a jump start with Mappedin.

Has Mappedin tailored to help us specifically, so just as we go through anything you can share that that can help army for the conversations internally? Would be helpful, we've got some people inside that are also digging around, looking at different solutions, so, I like our first chat, I like to understand how I can position Mappedin for success here.

Siewyee Sai: Okay! Gotcha! So, before we dive into the demo, I am just super curious so, what sparked your interest in searching for a digital mapping solution?

Greg Boyd: So, I think it is, it’s just what customers expect now. And so we need, you know customers right now with Covid in particular to come into a, to come into a physical space upside their home.

I mean that creates anxiety for a lot of our customers or shoppers. So giving them an ability to come to space and find their way around and know where they need to go what's efficient is important. But for our retailers, we're providing space for them, they're looking for ways that we can help them to grow their sales and so we need some sort of compelling offering that helps our retailers in this environment.

But is also then appealing to customers who are coming into our space. So, it's just something we feel like we need to do, but we've seen it done not well, so we're looking for something that would actually be adopted and useful.

Siewyee Sai: Right! And so I'm hearing a couple things that you know, that you're interested in looking at how clients can kind of find their way efficiently in your model. Is that is that correct?

Greg Boyd: Yeah that's right!

Siewyee Sai: Okay cool! And so I'm just curious like how often do you need to update your maps?

Greg Boyd: Gosh! Turnover in our space has been unusually high in the past year. So, I mean I'd say it's monthly, I'd say is probably the right cadence for us to do that. We’d love to be more agile, but we are a lean team. So let's just say it's a monthly update!

Siewyee Sai: So how like I'm curious so how do you ensure that your maps are accurate?

Greg Boyd: I mean, we have, I guess we have updated, just from our facility management, we're getting updates on leases and lease statuses, what spaces are open and closing in our floor prints. I mean that that's just operations on a weekly basis. So, that's how we stay in touch, how that information filters to us, on the digital marketing side, sometimes internal challenges, but it's pretty frequent.

Siewyee Sai: Right! So you okay so you get a lot of overseas tour groups and out of town visitors at your malls, is that correct?

Greg Boyd: That’s right!

Siewyee Sai: So what is what is the impact on your shopping journey when they use inaccurate maps?

Greg Boyd: I mean for I think that we when we've looked at that when we've analyzed foot traffic coming in and out of our space. we see I mean we see a few different things for people, there's people who just like to come in and explore and make use of the space grab a snack, sit down, I mean those aren't our highest value customers.

We’ve seen people who come in with an objective a place that they want to go. Counter-intuitively they're just going in for one store and then they are coming out, but if we can find ways to engage them, I'm in that in that experience in; in some way, we tend to capture more revenue from customers that actually have an idea of where they're looking to go instead of just exploring the space.

Siewyee Sai: Yeah absolutely! I hear you! So the idea that you know you need to make sure that the indoor way finding experience is quick, efficient and accurate. Is that is that is that correct? Is that what am I reading that right?

Greg Boyd: Absolutely! We’re looking to find ways to engage the engaged buyer.

Siewyee Sai: Right!

Greg Boyd: That’s absolutely right!

Siewyee Sai: Okay! Yeah! I hear you like if buyers are not engaged and they're frustrated right, like, that can mean money moving out of your mall and let me kind of share some personal experience with you like.

I'm a bit shopper myself, so you know and I have experienced the same type of frustration before I go to the mall I typically check the pdf mall maps and then when I get there I find that the store that I want to go to is gone and so I have to go to another mall and then I spend my money there instead. Does that ever happen to you?

Greg Boyd: Yeah! More than ever! We just I mean you would think that it reflects badly on the retailer but it doesn't, right? Those experiences reflect badly on us, when we when we're the when we're the location we're facilitating that interaction and so it's not viewed badly on the retailer, it's us. We take that hit.

Siewyee Sai: Gotcha and then I also heard earlier that you talked about you know kind of helping your retailers out a little bit to get more food traffic into the malls. Is that is that what I'm hearing?

Greg Boyd: Yeah! For us to stay for us to stay alive. I mean venues, commercial property, I mean it's just a whole different world and so yeah we're looking for ways to how can we build better partnerships with our retail partners.

Siewyee Sai: Right! Okay! here's an idea, Greg, so I know that you quite probably spent quite a bit of time editing your maps but, what do you think of the time that you're going to spend you know editing maps and saving that and using that to find ways to monetize the digital mapping?

Greg Boyd: This is our challenge! See, it's so ethical right now! It’s just this retailer's gone swapped the new and yeah and we have our own lags and delays and getting that updated!

Siewyee Sai: Okay! Great! So, let's dive into the demo and see how Mappedin solutions can help you and can meet your needs. So, when you log in from the website, this is what you're gonna see, on the left hand side, you're going to see a wide set of features. How many properties do you have in your portfolio?

Greg Boyd: We’ve got a couple hundred different properties that were there!

Siewyee Sai: Okay! So, do you see this drop down menu with the highlighted by the red circle? that's where you're gonna see and add your 100 over properties and Greg I know we spoke last week and you mentioned that you know you have often approached by retailers who want to ask you for secondary storefront and so often you have to split your maps into two, is that correct? Yeah?

Greg Boyd: Yeah! That’s right!

Siewyee Sai: Okay! So, this is how you're gonna do it here in the system, you're gonna come over here above the store space, you're gonna click on the split function and this is how you're going to split the store into two! So does this compare to your old mapping system does what I've shown you here look more efficient and easier to use!

Greg Boyd: Well! Yeah!

Siewyee Sai: Yeah that's great!

Greg Boyd: I mean that is a pretty simple and quick one!

Siewyee Sai: Great and so when you actually finalize your edits and you need to publish them on the website this is what you're gonna do, you just publish them instantly so basically this is what we call a one-two mini approach, meaning that instead of managing three maps across different multiple channels, you only need to manage one map in one content management system and so we've done and this helps you to save you know your man-hours your time and ultimately money, okay and studies were done with existing clients like Simon properties they tell us they say between 85 to 95 in time savings when they switch from their old covering mapping system to ours.

And because you control your map edits and your map process and you can publish your map edits in real-time, this means that you can be super confident that your maps can is always 100 accurate and that reduce your shopper's frustration and they spend you know and happy clients mean you get to spend more money in your mall. And we actually also did a case study with Simon properties and they tell us that after they switched our mapping system, they receive positive customer feedback and you know the use of the system has exceeded their target levels. Does that resonate with you by any chance?

Greg Boyd: Absolutely! It does!

Siewyee Sai: Yeah great! And this is a 3D map of the Florida mall which is the property owned by Simon properties, your business partner. And do you recognize this map?

Greg Boyd: Yes!

Siewyee Sai: I hear a laugh! So, this is a map owned by your competitor Mitzi Estate Company and you notice that these two maps look different because we can customize the look and feel of your maps to match the branding of your website. and here here's the thing, okay, Greg, properties like yours are actually adopting digital mapping with increase with increasing frequency in Japan and we want to want to make sure that you want to help you make sure that you remain at the bleeding edge of digital mapping technology. Do you have any hesitations in regards to what you have seen?

Greg Boyd: No we certainly want to move in this direction and as I mentioned at the outset and I'm mindful of our time. So just love to know I mean people are chattering internally I would like to position Mappedin to be successful for this case. I mean are there are there key competitors that I should be aware of or mindful of or and who what do you tend to come up against as reasons that people don't buy.

Siewyee Sai: Well that’s well I think compared to all competitors we have a fantastic user front-end user experience as you can see. Right? We’re able to customize your mall map the way you want you want to and we're very flexible in terms of pricing, okay. And pricing is really depending on what you want what you need and I sense a very clear interest in our products there. And so Greg, why don't we do this? Let’s book a full demo next week?

Greg Boyd: Yeah!

Siewyee Sai: Okay! Let’s how does next Monday at 9 A.M sound to you?

Greg Boyd: So I just have to try to take this internally so I mean I could just what's best is if you just send me some options, in terms of times.

Siewyee Sai: Okay! I can shoot you over a calendar link with some times. What’s your email? Is it still greg@mitsubishi.com?

Greg Boyd: That's right! Yep!

Siewyee Sai: Awesome! Great! so I'm going to shoot you a calendar link please feel free to distribute it to your team and then we can decide on a time and meet and take a deeper dive into our system and figure out what you want, what you need. Does that sound good?

Greg Boyd: Yeah! I'm happy to, happy to take that take that away thanks so much this has been a really helpful conversation, so…

Siewyee Sai: Great! I'm glad that it helped you is really lovely chatting with you, Greg.

Greg Boyd: Cool! Thank you I appreciate the time!

Siewyee Sai: Okay! I appreciate the time too and don't forget I'll chat over coffee over the recipes.

Greg Boyd: Yeah! Or you send me a second meeting invite for that?

Siewyee Sai: Yeah! I'm gonna do that!

Greg Boyd: Okay good! Thank you!

Siewyee Sai: Alright! Have a good one!

Greg Boyd: Alright! Thank you so much!

Siewyee Sai: You too! Bye now!

Greg Boyd: Bye!

Joseph Fung: Well done! See you had 18 seconds left on the clock. Alright! Right down to the wire!

Siewyee Sai: Yeah! I know! I know!

Joseph Fung: All good! You can stop sharing now! You can take a break! Take it easy!

Siewyee Sai: I am going to take a break!

Joseph Fung: Good job! Good job!

Siewyee Sai: Thank you!

Joseph Fung: We'll give all of our judges an opportunity to kind of put comments in, put scores in. Benjamin you're our last competitors, you'll be up in just a moment. Siewyee, how are you feeling now?

Siewyee Sai: I feel as if I can breathe now. And I'm like thinking, wow, Greg, you're kind of like fun to be like to talk to. Just when it comes to the recipes, right, we definitely have to chat!

Greg Boyd: Sure! Okay! I would like to get some Japanese curries and recipes, like bring that up I need some more of that!

Joseph Fung: See those are some great questions! You definitely made that a tough one for Greg! It helped me realize and remember how much of a challenge it is for our instructor Sheila and Callum have been doing this first past competitions as well. Greg, you handled that like a champ. Those are some tough questions that you fielded there!

Greg Boyd: Yeah there was some deep discovery! I feel like I feel like I'm resumes submitted to Mitsubishi so for yeah with all my prep! They’re wondering who's poking around their website.

Joseph Fung: You’re probably showing up in their marketing automation system there now!

Greg Boyd: I would like to!

Joseph Fung: Good stuff! I'm seeing most of our judges looking up! Can I get a thumbs up if you're done with your scores and your marking? Okay! Good stuff! Okay! Last but not least, one more final competitor. And then we'll get into some feedback, crown a winner and let everybody get out of here for the evening. Benjamin, any open questions? Are you good to go?

Benjamin Maier: No I'm good to go.

Joseph Fung: Awesome! then again tail reminders to introduce yourself, the product you're selling, who you're selling to, let us know if Greg's Uvaro, Mitsubishi, someone completely different but once you begin to pitch that's when I'll put the 15 minutes on the timer. And you'll be gonged or interrupted if you hit the limit, so watch out for that. Good luck!

Benjamin Maier: Okay! I'm Benjamin, I'm selling video to a Vice President of Operations at Varsity Communities which is a private student housing organization. We spoke once prior on the phone to this and they are responsible for implementing new tools property wide. Hey, Greg how are you?

Greg Boyd: Ben, I'm well good to be speaking with you again thanks for booking the time.

Benjamin Maier: It's good to put a face to the voice!

Greg Boyd: Yeah same here! Same here! No Zoom fatigue! No Zoom fatigue! Over here not at all it's good to its good to see people's faces these days when we're all cooped up!

Benjamin Maier: Absolutely! Especially a smile like you have there!

Greg Boyd: Yeah! Too kind!

Benjamin Maier: I saw that you're an Alumni at Laurier, I actually have a brother that that's an alumni and you know the only memory I have from him being there is, once a month we would go up there on a Monday and go to Lancaster smokehouse, now I don't know if you've been there before but that is probably the best barbecue in Ontario and Mondays you got jumbo wings, I'm gonna send you a link after this and we'll go from there but if you have gone, you know what I'm talking about.

Greg Boyd: Right! Yeah, I think I've forgotten what we're meeting about and what kind of meeting we're trying to book. But I'm into that! So, send the link and let's go!

Benjamin Maier: Absolutely! Well! Let's push that for free time.

Greg Boyd: Yeah!

Benjamin Maier: Now, before we get started, Greg, I wanted to typically go over a little bit of an agenda with you and just to confirm we have 15 minutes allotted for today.

Greg Boyd: Sure!

Benjamin Maier: Just to work for you.

Greg Boyd: Yeah I do have to step out right at that 15 minute mark. So, Ben, just a quick chat and to get us teed up would be would be perfect.

Benjamin Maier: No problem! We'll keep it a quick chat. and typically a 30 to an hour deeper dive follows this call with you or anyone else on your team that you feel might benefit so at the end we'll leave some time for other questions or just to get a read on the situation but if a further meeting doesn't make sense to you totally fine we'll just part as friends. Does that sound good?

Greg Boyd: Yeah that sounds good to me. I appreciate that Ben. Yeah!

Benjamin Maier: Awesome! so last time we spoke on the phone we got to talking a little bit about your sales process your timeline and that you're kind of looking for an alternative. But I wanted to ask you before we kind of continue. What is your lead generation process like right?

Greg Boyd: Now, oh, I mean I'm sure you can appreciate. I mean it's tough it's a tough market for us right now. and I wouldn't say desperate necessarily but I'd say that we're I mean we're just stuck and that we and we've got capacity to build space and demand is something we have to go and search for. S

o I mean any and all methods right now are what we're employing anything from posters in the street to we're trying to get some better ads and add space online. But I think where we can employ and have personal outreach happening, we're doing that but it's just a tough thing for us to scale.

Benjamin Maier: What are your kind of main methods that you use for outreach right now?

Greg Boyd: Like for digital outreach like not the posters? I mean gee we're I mean we're doing anything from I mean it's not a lot of calls I'd say but it's a lot of email campaigns that we're rolling out. I'd say.

Benjamin Maier: And you know I've heard that the schools are going to be going back online in the fall but you know since the pandemic, how has remote learning kind of affected those methods?

Greg Boyd: Well I'd say that, there's a lot of noise and chat like just a lot of a lot of noise. Right? I mean I don't know about you my phone rings all the time with robo calls so we kind of ditched that sort of approach and inbox is full.

So, I think our response rates are down. I mean we're trying to just increase the noise just so we're staying on the competitive landscape. So, we're being heard or seen. But it just feels like we're fighting a losing battle, to be honest. We’re just more volume or volume just to, just keep up with the competition. But it's not really getting as much in terms of conversion.

Benjamin Maier: I hear you and you know I've actually spoken to another company in the Kitchener area and they mentioned trying to use Zoom to kind of update their tours. Have you kind of dived into that as a solution or an alternative?

Greg Boyd: Yeah we've got some basic video tours that are that have been created. But I mean just to try to do anything that is personal, I mean we just we don't have any way to validate that it's actually hitting the mark or helping. And so we just, we I mean we haven't given that much thought. So we've got some pretty static content. But, I think personal is a direction that we're interested to go.

Benjamin Maier: And you know in your line of work, you want to make sure that you have that personal touch from that beginning application all the way on to signing that lease and you know especially with the pandemic and person-to-person kind of going off the rails, you need to find an alternative bring that personalization back. Is that is that correct?

Greg Boyd: Yeah! Absolutely! I mean I think that this ultimately is home right? it's going to be a space people call home and so if we're going to we're going to sell effectively, I think we got to connect personally. Again we just don't just doesn't feel like we got the right tools but I'm hoping that maybe you could help us out with that.

Benjamin Maier: Yeah absolutely! you know I think I got some tools that it'll definitely help you with you know some of the struggles that you're talking about and I can I can see that it's frustrating when you have outreach down and engagements down and especially with students they're young they're innovative you want to keep engagement higher and you want to keep adapting to that. Right? And you know when you have just words, or you have a phone call. Where’s the connection there? Right?

Greg Boyd: Yeah! Absolutely!

Benjamin Maier: Yeah! and you know I think what I'm gathering from this is that you're looking for a solution that brings up personalization back that brings that face you know to your email brings that human factor to your outreach. Is that correct?

Greg Boyd: I'd say so! Because I mean also I think our buyers, it's the students like you mentioned, but its parents too right? And for parents to know who they're who they're creating that relationship with I think that's an important thing for us to consider.

Benjamin Maier: Absolutely! Absolutely! and you know when it comes to parents they won't actually see it right they don't want to get all the information from an email and just ask questions with 30 emails they want to see what it actually is and you know when you have in person tours down, it's hard to kind of manifest that, right. I can see that's a little bit of frustration for you.

Greg Boyd: Totally! Yeah!

Benjamin Maier: Awesome so you know I actually think that I got a little bit to go on and I think there's some help that we can have with Vidyard and your kind of situation right now. So what I'm going to do now is I'm actually going to share my screen and give you a little bit look a window into what implementation might look like. So just give me one sec to get this set up good?

Greg Boyd: Sure

Benjamin Maier: Okay! So, I'm just going to! Awesome! Okay! So! Fantastic! Okay! Can you confirm that you can see my screen right now there?

Greg Boyd: Yep! I got it! Yep!

Benjamin Maier: Awesome! Awesome! Now, I'm no dark Brown, but welcome to the future! This is the Vidyard library! Now, this is only a little bit of a taste to what implementation might look like, but I wanted to give you a window into what you can actually benefit from this program. Now this is my personal library and it's actually a test account.

So it's a little bit different to what your implementation might look like. But I wanted to dive into one of these videos and kind of give you a glimpse of what you can use it for. And this is king street towers it's actually one of your competitors in the area. But what I want to show you with this is the editing window.

Now what I want to make sure of is that you don't have any more work added to your situation. You’re only upgrading your current methods and you know you use Zoom, you use email so let's keep those at the center. Now if you look over to here. this is called the email share and what you can do with this is you can actually draft your whole application email you know your outreach to a new lead, all through the program and what you can do is you know if you've already taken a tour video on Zoom.

We don't want to you know make that go to waste what video actually does it integrates with Zoom so you can actually either use video to create the video or actually have your videos from Zoom uploaded like a tour or you know any type of question that you might be asking or answering for a parent. So what you can do with this…

Greg Boyd: Is does that mean we don't have to throw away our video so any video we have we can actually load in here and use that?

Benjamin Maier: Exactly! Exactly! It’s not an alternative, it's more of an upgrade, it's adding to your roster of tools. We want to make it easier for you, not harder for you and especially your team you know it's fast.

So when implementation might happen we want to make sure that it's easy for them to pick up rather than have to learn it through zero matter of month’s right? So what I also think is very substantial about this page is also this embed feature down here. Now as you kind of move to digital outreach, you've also kind of moved to digital applications too.

Now we've spoken to King so I don't know if you're in that kind of method right now. But what I think is cool about this is not only can you embed like let's say a tour video; you can also embed your digital application, you can start right from ground one to get that call to action rather than having to go through several emails just for them to ask for the application.

I think you can have it ready in that email with a tour video answering any questions that they might have and that allows them to already get through the application process from that first initial outreach. Saves you time, saves your team also you know time as well as having to communicate with those individuals. Now is this something that you know makes sense to you?

Greg Boyd: It does! I mean I love the fact that we can get better engagement with video. I mean the piece from an engagement perspective is a question for me or the personalization is a question. Doing this in a personal way feels like something that could take a lot of time. So, I mean how do you scale and approach like this? Or is there a way to scale it?

Benjamin Maier: Well! That’s the thing is like what we're looking at right here is the free account. Now there’s a different stage to what you can get from Vidyard. But, what I want you to make sure is that you understand that content is sorry is unlimited so you can have either this free account or a paid account with unlimited content in the capacity that you can make you can you know edit you can do whatever you want when it comes to creation and while it might seem like you're creating more time.

You’re actually creating one place to either create or to edit or to store that content. So instead of having to go to Zoom, to go to email, to go to Gmail, to go to your calendar, you can have all of your video content and your tours in one compact place in this case figure now. what I also think is great is that you want to make sure that they're going to watch the video right and you know if you have let's say a bedroom as your view of the video, they might not click it, they might be intrigued, but they might not click it.

What I also think is cool about this is you can set an animated gif. You can make it personable right from when they click that email. So you can have you know a wave or hey!

How’s it going? and then right away they can get a little bit of a glimpse of what you bring to the table as a human perspective because the thing is when it comes to student housing they have to live there with you it doesn't just end when you get the lead it doesn't just end when you sign the lease they have to communicate with you throughout that whole process so you want to make sure that you create that lasting first impression right from the get-go. Does that make sense?

Greg Boyd: It does! I'm curious! I mean I'm very interested! one of the things that I think I might I might have to just run by my peers in the executive team, I mean who else is doing something like this I mean we're not a bleeding-edge kind of company. We know we got to fill seats that are our number one priority or fill rooms that are our number one priority. But you know, do you have other I mean do you have other companies that look kind of like us doing something like this?

Benjamin Maier: Yeah! You know what I think is amazing about Vidyard is it's not based in industry. It’s based on a need. it's based on a need for outreach to bring personalization to that communication. And right now the pandemic has hit every industry. And a lot of these industries can't have that person-to-person contact or that engagement in person. So they need to come up with a new way of outreach and with that video. That’s why this is the future, Greg. Now…

Greg Boyd: I just need a DeLorean and I'm ready to go.

Benjamin Maier: Oh we'll save that for the next call. I want to make sure that we're staying within time. So I think I've kind of showed you everything that I want to show you on here. Now as you can see there's a whole list of menus on the side, Vidyard is vast. There’s a lot of just a lot to discuss and a lot of features. But I want to make sure that you know we cover everything that you feel is important today. And that if there's any other questions, then we can absolutely book a further meeting if that makes sense to you.

Greg Boyd: Yeah! So very interested to move this forward it seems like something that we could make use of quickly and could have an impact. Just like your advice on what would be involved? What is the best or next right step for us to be taking here?

Benjamin Maier: Yeah absolutely! So what I want to do is I want to make sure that you know we hit the ground running so after this call I want to set another appointment to go through a deeper dive with you, your team. If you have any questions for technical questions, I can also provide an individual from our dev team on that further call so that we can go from there. That sounds good?

Greg Boyd: That sounds good to me. I think that that'd be helpful!

Joseph Fung: I am sorry gentlemen! I know you've got a time machine there but unfortunately the limits still apply.

Benjamin Maier: Yeah! Yeah! no problem! No problem!

Joseph Fung: This is good stuff! Well done, Benjamin. This is really good. I want to give our judges a couple of minutes to finish out notes and ratings. So for all of you, take a breath. Amazing job! There’s a ton of flow there! Selfishly, I'm glad I got to use the gong a few times. I like my tech on my buttons. That was a blast! Benjamin, how are you feeling?

Benjamin Maier: Feeling good! Feeling good! A little bummed! I couldn't secure next steps. But, I was so close!

Joseph Fung: You're close! You had in there! Just finishing up the details! The facts that you got a new back to the future joke that and barbecue those are some good angles in there! That was nice! so while our while our judges are filling out notes, all our competitors are taking a break, you know we're lucky enough to have at least one of our instructors here, Sheila, I'd love to kind of quickly tap you, seeing the class getting through this. Any comments? Any observations?

Sheila: Guys you killed it I'm so proud of you guys it’s really this is the first time I've gotten to just sit and observe demo day I'm normally sitting in the buyer seat and holy smokes am I grateful for the opportunity to just go get to watch you guys work because that was incredible great work all of you and thank you for that entire class what you guys did for each other over the last 12 weeks was just amazing!

Joseph Fung: That was that was great! Definitely! Big, Big thumbs up! And plus one to everything that she said! that was really impressive! Greg, if you could get us through some of the feedback, comments, then we'll move on to crowning a winner. But maybe you can start off some high level comments and then walk us through the judges.

Greg Boyd: Yeah! I'd be happy to! So this is my first time sitting in this seat and to Sheila’s point, to be able to be subject to this sort of experience and just see and hear the way each of you approach the whole experience for me as a buyer was very powerful.

So I just want to thank each one of you and the whole Cohort Sheila, Alex the work you guys have done together to just all support each other and get to this place is remarkable because it felt great to sit and hear some great pivots and some great approaches. And things that you're going to be able to take and apply. And so I'm excited about that. And each of you and the whole class you'll just enrich the community of Uvaro as you continue on.

So there are a lot of great things to be said there. if you don't mind, a couple of key things that I know the judges are going to touch on but the customer stories were, everyone had an example, and Ben you didn't state a customer name, but I loved that pivot into a broader need. What a cool approach. So great tactics employed by everyone across the board.

And I'd love now to have our judges way in because you've probably heard enough of me kind of trying to pivot and handle your questions. So you definitely put me to the test. It’s a great job on the discovery everyone. but what I'd love to do is, we'll go one by one we'll start with feedback for Eli, or Eli sorry and I think that that would put us at Shane if you don't mind gathering some notes give some feedback, and let us know some of your thoughts on how Eli did would be great.

Shane Gamble: Yeah! Yeah! Happy to! Man! So much to say. Also what a supportive crew that was kind of behind everybody presenting. I absolutely loved! It I was feeling the energy and super engaged with that! Eli, man I thought you did a fantastic job overall. Your energy is so infectious; your ability to build rapport is next to none.

You just came into the conversation, you own the room, and I just felt the energy coming out of you. Now I really felt one of the pieces that you did incredibly well when it came to the discovery was asking some difficult questions. You really put Greg on the spot and you could see him in those scenarios really thinking and calculating.

Which is ultimately what we want to do in a really healthy and respectful way to push our clients. Which I think was really important and you did really well. I would like to see a little bit more open-mindedness on a couple of the discovery questions. But I think if you changed some of those from doing use to how do you or what are you currently doing in this area as opposed to yes no's, it would be phenomenal. So great job on that.

Moving on to you know the demo, I thought that it was very simple from a visuals perspective your social proof was great you had a perfect comeback when he said, who's a client like me that's using your tool and you were right there, I could tell you prepared and you knew which example.

I'd heard a piece of advice once in my career which is, if you are selling to a footwear company and they're a small startup, don't tell them that you work with Nike. Tell them that you work with a company like them. You did a fantastic job on that. And from a next steps perspective great job I know we got cut off and I was so bummed that we did because I wanted to see you sharing that great moment at the end. But you did a fantastic job.

I think for you the only piece of feedback that I would have there, is everyone's busy there's no better time than now to get that meeting booked. So even though you had the email you knew who we're talking to, we agreed on the next steps hey do you got your calendar in front of you, I would absolutely love to get a time scheduled in and we can move around from there. But the fantastic job they're so lucky to have you moving into your new role. You’re going to do fantastic! Great job man! Really proud of you!

Eli Zeldin: Thank you so much for that!

Greg Boyd: yeah! I was looking for Eli. Good! I'm making sure after you!

Eli Zeldin: I really appreciate all the feedback! And I'm really hoping that I can get can get some of that in writing so that I can implement it into my day-to-day.

Shane Gamble: Hey man! I'm not hard to find! I'm always happy to do you know coffee or anything like that! Happy to help in any way that I can! Great job again!

Eli Zeldin: Thank you! Thank you!

Greg Boyd: Yeah! Awesome! Yeah! I'll plus one that feedback on the customer example Eli that you had it ready and then you use it a few other times. It wasn't just once it you layered it in that was that was so impressive! Great work! Okay so I think next up would love to hear some feedback perspective on Abhi. Some feedback from Maddison. So Madison, over to you to share some comments from the pitch Abhi did on the Vidyard platform.

Maddison Fairbairn: Awesome! So, fantastic job everyone! I was so excited watching all of the demos I want to buy some of these products! I don't need them, but I want them to like you did such a good job that way! Abhi, you had amazing rapport building right at the beginning. You almost got rapport and pain point all in one!

You had a fantastic last year! How are you going to keep that going? like you researched? And you knew it? But it also built that that pain points right into it at the beginning which was fantastic. For the demo, really good overview and the biggest part was your excitement and passing that excitement along. I think there were a couple of times you said you're gonna be excited about this and they were like it just builds onto it.

And it's fantastic! so keeping that going through you were the only person that got that calendar invite in the calendar date and time next step and awesome thank you so much! It’s fantastic! Like if there's no calendar who knows if it's actually going to happen it needs to be in that calendar and you push through it even with those objections. So that was amazing! Overall! Fantastic demo! I would love to use Vidyard and you've brought us in. and it's great!

Greg Boyd: Abby tossing it to you, giving you a space to react!

Abhi Lenka: I'm supposed to react now! Thank you!

Greg Boyd: Certainly! You have permission to! Yes!

Abhi Lenka: Yeah! I'm kind of out of words! Thank you so much!

Greg Boyd: Yes! Great job Abhi! Yeah! I will I will again on that on that plus one to pushing through the objection and making sure we got the meeting book Abhi. Well done! For sure on that point! Thanks Madison for that! Okay, SiewYee, you did a great job! Demoing Mappedin and to hear about to give you some feedback and give some perspective James would love for you to comment on SiewYee’s demo of the Mappedin platform.

James Howell: Yeah! So SiewYee, when you were starting off, everyone was talking in the chat you just had this incredible energy about you. And it was so natural! it was just and actually I have to say I think that part of it is your laugh and just like keep those laughs coming during your you know career in sales because it is one of those laughs that is just infectious and it's genuine and it's so authentic and I just I thought it was great.

During the initial first couple of moments, Greg said something and I think that this is an important thing to just consider for the future. He said that, he had a big hill to climb which is a metaphor and metaphors are a really cool opportunity to kind of dance in a conversation with your prospects you could ask him about that hill and you can talk about you know he can start associating some of his pains to that hill. So that's just one little thing that I noticed during that stage that maybe was an opportunity for you to consider for the future.

But I also really liked how you specifically asked him about the impact which is something that is I think a key part is, having them themselves hear what the impact is hearing your own voice come out and say this is what the impact is for my pain point.

It’s very powerful and it's kind of truly servicing or sorry serving your client or your potential client. When we got to the demo, I think your personal story during the demo was my absolute favorite part of it. I think that that also really resonated with Greg as well and it was just a great use of personal disclosure.

Most people don't really want to necessarily hear about what the salesperson's personal experiences are but this was just such a seamless use of that again, it speaks to your authenticity your genuineness, and your excitement, your energy which was awesome, it was clear towards the end that you were running a little bit low on time and I recognize this is a short amount of time; you've got 15 minutes you're trying to make it happen.

I still think that you were working you know pretty seamlessly throughout it all. the best part I thought of the end of the devil is when you're like okay we're doing a demo next week what's like what are we doing and it was just such a powerful transition. You know I did not do it any justice in what I just said right there, but you basically were just like okay we got to do a proper thing next week, when are we doing this and it was just very powerful very good. So yeah I was very impressed and yeah keep it up you have a really bright and just authentic future in sales which is amazing. So well done!

Greg Boyd: SiewYee great job! We won't put you on the spot. I can see that you're sitting there taking it in. so great job, James great feedback. One of the things that I thought was super cool too was when she showed see when you showed the competitor, here's your competitors, well look at what it could look like with us, that was cool, that was very well smooth and well played, yeah, I thought that was good!

James Howell: I totally agree! That was super cool! Yeah! Yeah!

SiewYee Sai: Thank you! That’s all I'm saying and I just want to take the opportunity to thank everybody in my team, in my class. I love every single one of you guys! You taught me so much over the 12 weeks! You know I it was so hard for me to come up here and do this demo with all my friends. It’s so hard! Because I see them as my friends. And it's just one of those things. So yeah I love you guys!

Greg Boyd: SiewYee, thank you so much for that! Great comments, James! And I too I'm a big fan of the personal when I go into a mall or when I left that! I think I left that call feeling like I was actually working at Mitsubishi. And I was actually going to buy a Mappedin. So great work! Alright! And last but certainly not least Ben and the demo Vidyard. So I would love Cedric to hear your comments and feedback on Ben’s demo. So I'll throw it over to you!

Cedric D'Souza: For sure! Thank you! so right off the bat, Benjamin, when you're talking with your brother I was like I was wondering where you were gonna go with it and then when you tied in you know Lancaster’s like you got it like tying in a food spot with a prospect like especially a popular one!

So great! Especially I loved your transition from rapport building to like the upfront contract was great! It was such a smooth transition! Such great! You had such great open-ended questions one thing that I could suggest is Greg said a few things use that as in you know basis for your next question and build off that because then in that sense then like you can understand you can dig in a little deeper to his pain but you did such a great job!

Loved some of your languages during the demo because it was very customer-focused! it was like you know I can show you what you would bring into the field! Right! This is what they would be using! and the last thing that I have to say I really appreciated was you waited for a few seconds after Greg to wait, waiting for Greg to finish, he waited for him to finish, wait a few seconds, and then spoke I know you sacrificed some time in the end. But that's key! Honestly great job!

Benjamin Maier: Awesome! Thank you! for the feedback everyone! And truly this entire process has been honestly unbelievable and to know that I'm here with my friend SiewYee, great to be competing with everyone and have everyone watch it. So I appreciate everything and thank you for the feedback!

Joseph Fung: So we've hit through! I think all of the judges, Greg, I know you're watching the scorecards do we do we have a winner are you ready to crown a champion?

Greg Boyd: Well! I think we think we are! but before I officially do that there was I said I made that comment about see I'll say it actually for each one of you who pitched tonight that up on my screen I had you or your face and then I had what you were sharing on your screen and each one of you made me feel like I was actually buying from you and I've bought products before b2b products and each one of you has a tremendous future in this.

And you're already doing it which is so exciting and so much to offer back to the community and it's just it was a very impressive showing. So kudos to each one of you and again to the team that they got you there because I know you all travel together. So great job everybody. It is the universal comment for me! So it's great to…sorry go ahead, Joseph!

Joseph Fung: Just before you share, if we can get everyone to turn off their mutes so that when you're clapping we can all hear you. That would be super helpful! Yeah! Drop the mutes and then, Greg, if you could tell who’s that! Let us know who those winners are!

Greg Boyd: And here we go! So, the good news about demo days of all the greats the great things that are happening the challenge is picking that winner and we do have a vector tonight. And so I'm just checking to see that everybody's off mute so that they're able to congratulate our 2020-12 Cohort champion demoing the video platform, Abhi. Congratulations!

Joseph Fung: Abhi, how are you feeling?

Abhi Lenka: Oh! I was not expecting this!

Joseph Fung: That's awesome! And I know everyone here has so much support for you, for each other! You’ll have time to debrief collect all the feedback tomorrow. We’re giving you some time on the Zoom too! We do have a few housekeeping things because we promise to get everybody out so if you can!

Let me take care of some of the housekeeping. We’ll let the folks on YouTube go and we've got a little time left here in Zoom but for everybody, job, well done and for Abhi especially congratulations! Great job! So to take care of some of that housekeeping. I'm going to share a little bit of content.

Let me get my screen shared. So those of you in Zoom can also see what we're highlighting. Number one for anybody who's tuning in if you'd like an introduction to any of our grads the competitors competed today others, you can always reach out just let us know that's our job we're happy to make that happen. So please feel free to reach out.

As well, if you'd like to get notified of any of our upcoming events, you can see the links here on the screen. But, there's a couple that I'd love to bring your attention to number one, our next demo day is happening on Thursday, April 8th and that'll be at 9 to 11 Eastern. So that'll be a lot of fun a good way to start the day to see some great sales challenges. And then our next immediate next coming up event is again a cold calling blitz.

It's a great time to shake off some Cobwebs. If you haven't made any cold calls in a while or to try it out if you're exploring new things and that's happening on March 16th from 6 to 7 PM Eastern and again the links to any of our events are at uvaro.com/events. The last thing I'd love to clean up with before we let the folks go on YouTube is a huge congratulations and a big thank you!

So congrats to all of our competitors, all of our grads. The 12 weeks is an intense process. It’s a crucial and these events are taking what they normally have 30 minutes to do and cramming it into 15. So it's a big challenge congrats on making it this far and for getting through and graduating and everything you've done and again for our judges, we couldn't be doing this without you.

So, big thank you not just for providing valuable feedback here but helping launch some amazing careers. So for everybody for tuning in, that was awesome! We’ll catch you on the next demo day and we'll chat with you all soon! Happy selling!